Born Unto the New Age
by BiblioMatsuri
Summary: Fantasy AU. Severe AU. A story of love and hate, hope and betrayal, deception and illusion - and a narrator that gets interrupted when he gets too verbose, much to his displeasure. Rated (so far) for one very indirect mention of death.
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: I don't own DP.

BGM: "Never Wonder Why" by Altaria

* * *

Prologue

Once upon a time, in a world very different from and yet akin to our own, there were three very different places, and in these places-

Oh, shut up! Who's telling this story to whom, you pests?

Thank you.

Now, first among them was the prosperous Viridian Kingdom, a land of hills, lakes and forests. Its people were shepherds and hunters, crafters and healers. Magicians, smiths and artisans competed to produce the best new machines and spells, their livelihoods turning by the vagaries of the market.

In the mountains to the north was the Principality of Aragon, named for its immortal sorcerer-king. Its people were as immortal as he, and could not be killed by old age, by sickness, nor by any mortal hand. For all that, they lived under a constant curse of darkness and stagnation, and any new ideas that appeared were quickly and violently taken out of the Dragon Prince's misery.

To the west lay the Low Wilds, commonly known as the Blasted Pit – quite literally, due to the steep cliffs falling off the eastern borders of Viridian and Aragon. Its people were wanderers, dozens of interconnected tribes who scrabbled what they could from the semiarid waste, trading with their neighbors only days before raiding their stores. They were, by and large, as fearsome as the steppes in which they lived, warped and changed by generations of living off a land shaped by chaos itself.

* * *

Aragon, grasping tyrant that he was, had set his sights on the lush forests and fields of Viridian. However, only the heads and elders of the border tribes of the Low Wilds knew the hidden route that could bypass the perilous cliffs. He bargained with them for safe passage over the border in exchange for tools and weapons that would never dull or break. He could not leave his capital, and so sent his best spy. He would appear in Viridian as no more than a wandering tinker, a drifter come to the capital for the new kings' coronation.

Three days after Aragon gave the order, the king of Viridian was dead.

The king left no heirs, had no relatives closer than a nephew and a few third cousins. The nobility of Viridian squabbled over the throne like the proverbial vultures, and all the while the noose drew tighter.

* * *

The youngest son of the headman of the Storm Shaped tribe discovered the agreement. His father and the elders' council had all agreed to this- this travesty! The Storm Shaped tribe had traded with the traveling merchants of Viridian for centuries. His own mother had been the daughter of a minor noble, and his sister was married to one of the richest merchants in the country.

He took any record he could find and his father's second-best horse, and set off for Viridian. He traveled as swiftly as he could, stopping only when the midday heat became too much and to rest his mount. He just had to find his sister's husband, and they would help him, he just knew it.

This was cold comfort when his horse died when the dry riverbed he'd been traveling in suddenly flooded. _Perhaps, _he thought as he shivered, soaked and scared, _there was a good reason why my father would not let me travel past our borders yet. Or do anything more complicated than watching the goats…_

It took him nearly two months to reach the capital. He arrived to martial law, a curfew and a draft. War had been declared – on all the myriad tribes of the Low Wilds.

* * *

The Dragon Prince watched as Viridian and the Wilds tore themselves apart, and laughed at the foolishness of mortal men.

* * *

A/N: I'm starting yet another new story. *hits head on desk* Sorry... I've had ideas for a fantasy AU rattling around in my head for months, and I've gotten enough together to build a story. I figured this was as good a time as any to start it.

By the way, points if you can figure out either who the narrator is, or who the chief's son is. The answers may surprise you. (No, I have no clue what the points will do. Except maybe measure how impressed I am.)


	2. Strange Lands and Strangers

Disclaimer: I don't own DP.

BGM: "Cry Just a Little" by Avantasia.

* * *

Strange Lands and Strangers

The rain was at that curious halfway point between a drizzle and proper raindrops, wet and miserable and the damp getting into everything. The townspeople scurried along the sides of the street, keeping under the oilcloth rain canopies at the storefronts, hunching down into whatever shelter their coats and hats could provide.

A boy leaned against a stone wall, arms folded around himself and the oilcloth bundle in his arms. His tunic and trousers were ragged, and they might have been green before road dust, mud and rain washed them all a uniform gray-brown. If a passerby had looked closely enough, they might have seen the cuffs and collar folded in, an odd choice for someone caught without a jacket on a cold day. His shoes were simple leather sandals, open to the elements, though the soles were at least thick enough to protect him from bits of metal or broken glass, or sharp stones on the rough terrain he'd been traveling for months before arriving in Amity Park.

Amity Park was a middling-sized trading-town, the outskirts less than a week's travel as the crow flies from the eastern border. Despite its small size, it was one of very few places where the insulated tribesmen of the Wilds, suspicious of the Viridians' strange ways, would trade with the local merchants. Under any other circumstances, the boy would have simply been another foreigner, a trader's young relative running errands to keep him out from underfoot.

However, this particular boy lacked the protection of anonymity. He had not had the presence of mind to bring more than one spare tunic, and all of his outer clothing was the distinctive deep green worn only by a tribal chief and his immediate relatives, not likely to be found running errands in a Viridian city. Said clothing was embroidered at the cuffs, hems and collar in patterns that any traveling merchant worth his salt would recognize as the interlocking triangle patterns assigned to a Middle Wilds tribal chief's younger children. Due to the recent declaration of a state of war with the tribes of the Wilds,said clothing was the equivalent of painting a giant target on his chest and putting a glow-spell on it for good measure.

_Which is ridiculous,_ he thought, _most of the tribes won't even have heard about the death of the Viridian king yet. I hadn't. Only four of the tribes were actually working with the Dragon Prince, and he's getting off scot free while these moronic tree-munchers blame my people and a whole lot of people that don't give a camel's crap about what happens to this place are going to die._

_(It's all your fault.) _Ah, and there was that traitorous little voice in his mind. It had first appeared when he'd sneaked out of his father's tent with the papers that were now clutched to his chest, berating him for going behind his father's back, and gotten progressively louder, more insistent and more creative since then. He glared at nothing, telling the voice to shut up right _now_. It didn't help his foul mood any, but at least it was quieter.

…_Wait, it stopped?_

He looked up, and was a little startled to realize that sometime during his argument with himself, the rain had stopped falling, and the sun could almost be seen through a thin spot in the clouds. Never one to pass up an opportunity, he examined the travel bag he'd kept the precious documents in and the oilcloth tied around to make sure they wouldn't come loose or leak. He took a deep breath, heeding half-remembered advice from a fussy caretaker, and vanished into the crowd.

* * *

Biting his lip, the boy stood in front of a wooden gate, the varnished wood bright against the rain-darkened stone of the outer wall. Even in the cities, the rich and powerful of Viridian still insisted on shutting themselves up in fortresses. As a result, the house of the second-richest merchant in Amity Park, Ceferino Molina, very closely resembled a mountain castle in miniature, appropriately scaled down and altered to suit the quiet prosperity of peacetime. At least unless someone attempted to break in, in which case they would find themselves hampered by the smooth outer coating of mud preventing anyone from climbing the walls, the cast-iron spikes painted red to hold off rust, and the layered spells all over the grounds, never mind the defenses on the house itself.

He swallowed, hard. Hopefully, they wouldn't mind taking visitors. One visitor, unannounced, who had in retrospect crossed the border illegally. He drew himself up and placed one hand on the threshold glyph on the wall beside the gate, alerting whoever was on guard duty. They would either let him in or tell their superiors. Unless they had orders to detain or even kill Wilds men on sight.

_I am being ridiculous. These people are almost-tribe, they're family. My oldest sister is married to the master of the house, and in Viridian even rich men only get the one wife. Family doesn't kill family… at least, not in this day and age! It just doesn't happen._

_(Oh, really? What about Father conspiring with the Dark Prince?)_

_That- that was different._ The answer sounded weak, even in his head, and his personal nuisance felt very smug.

He reached a hand up and swiped at his forehead, brushing back choppy bangs that fell into his eyes. He hadn't had a haircut in – ugh, almost three months. It had been two months since he'd seen soap, and scrubbing with river sand was just not the same. He missed soap. Yes, back home the dust got everywhere, but at least he knew what was in the dust. Here, he was liable to wake some disgusting little creature with every step on the leaf-strewn earth, and the little creatures were almost always poisonous or parasitic. He'd seen what happened to men stung by a scorpion, and had regretted not wearing his winter boots within a week of leaving.

The boy surreptitiously lifted an arm and sniffed, then reeled. Oh, he was not going to make a good impression.

Suddenly, the gate's hinges creaked, and he jumped back.

_Self-opening doors. I will never get used to the machines of Viridian._

Two men came through the gate, dressed in the reinforced cloth and leather uniforms of city watch on duty.

_Wait, city guards on a private estate? Something's wrong._

The man on the left was tall and broadly built, a wall of muscle gone slightly to fat around the middle, but still more than capable of overpowering him by size and weight advantage alone. The fact that he held only a small polished-wood bat in one meaty hand, smacking it against the other with a too-loud _thock_, added weight to that theory. He looked down at the boy and boomed out, "Who goes there?"

The man on the boy's right was thinner, shorter, and significantly older, a thin ring of white-gray hair peeking out from under a leather cap and pale stubble scattered over the lower half of his face. His uniform had the bright triple-stripe pattern that he vaguely remembered denoted a watch sergeant, and the boy belatedly noticed the larger man only had two stripes.

_Only a regular watchman, then, for all his mass._ The Storm Shaped chief's young son calmed slightly, reasoning that since he was on their land, if they wanted to hurt him, they most likely would. His best bet would be to be as polite and cooperative as humanly possible, and hope they were in a good mood. Swallowing again to remove the lump from his throat, he squeaked out, "I'm here to see the lady Molina, officers."

The larger man narrowed his beady black eyes at him, and the boy instantly found himself sweating to match the heat of the hottest midsummer noon. The smaller man rolled his eyes and grumbled, then reached up and swatted the large man on the back of his head. "Cool it, rookie. You're going to give the boy a heart attack."

Said boy noted that the sergeant seemed to lack hostile intentions towards him, had a very raspy voice that suggested he was a habitual smoker, and deserved his most sincere thanks.

"Ah, thank _you_."

Of course, the sentence had ended about two octaves higher than it started. The sergeant looked at him calmly as his junior partner suppressed a snigger. He failed, and giving a belly laugh, he clutched his sides and dropped his bat. The old man sighed and, picking up the bat, he told the boy, "Come in. We can question you just as well inside the gate as outside, and I don't think our relief is going to be very happy if the rookie is blocking the way when they get here."

The boy nodded and followed him.

Just before the gate closed, the sergeant called over his shoulder, "You can catch up when you're done impersonating a donkey, Fenton."

* * *

They took him to the gatehouse, arriving at the same time as a small girl in a modest dress, cap and apron wobbling with a heavy tray of food. The boy looked longingly at the rolls of bread and bowls of stew. Wordlessly, the older man handed the boy one of the rolls. The boy looked at him wide-eyed, too hungry to give a fig for his dignity.

"Go on, eat it," the man drawled. "I can never finish these enormous meals the kitchen sends us. It'd just go back to the kitchen staff, anyway."

Needing no further encouragement, the boy grabbed the roll and bit off a huge piece. He chewed, swallowed, and nearly choked on the dry bread. The man offered him one of the stiff-sided, drum-shaped waterskins used in Viridian, but the boy only drew the bag closer to himself.

"You can put it down, kid. No one's going to take… whatever that is," the man gestured at it, then pointed his thumb at a small table outside the gatehouse. It was a flimsy wooden thing, with metal legs in an odd triangular configuration. The boy looked at it uncomfortably, but the increasingly parched feeling of his throat made the decision for him. He bent down, set the bag carefully on the table next to the food tray, then whirled around and grabbed the waterskin.

After he could breathe again, the boy gasped out his thanks. This time, he mercifully avoided sounding like a startled child. "I don't want to impose, but could I finish the bread later?"

"Fine," the sergeant replied in a clipped tone.

The boy stiffened. Whatever kind impulse the watchman may have had, it had evaporated like water on a sun-heated rock. He moved to put the bread back on the tray, reasoning that the watchman had no reason to steal it, when suddenly a gale swept the half the tray away.

_No, wait, it just looked like one for a moment_, he corrected, watching the larger watchman inhale a bowl of stew and the remaining bread roll with speed his brothers would have envied.

The man finished, setting the spoon down next to the empty bowl on the tray. Blinking, he looked around for something, and perked up as he caught sight of – the little servant girl?

"Millie! Come here, you little nutcase," the giant said fondly, patting the drying stones of the main walk invitingly. He smiled as she plopped down next to him, and she gave him a gap-toothed smile in return.

The boy blinked. Then he rubbed his eyes. Then he just stared. _This is the man-mountain who I'd been so sca- intimidated by? The walking stomach who is now chattering with a little girl?_ _What the crumbs._

Raising an eyebrow at the scene, the sergeant commented, "You're not the first one to say something like that. Thank you for watching your language. You'd be amazed at how few of our guests at headquarters don't bother being polite."

The boy's mouth shut with an audible _clack_. "I said that out loud, didn't I?" he asked tonelessly.

The old man shrugged. Then he turned to the younger man and remarked, "You about done there, Watchman?"

The aforementioned watchman looked up and replied, "Oh, almost done, boss. Millie here just told me about what Timmy and his friends got up to today. Did you know the whole orchard is striped green and pink now? They say it'll be weeks until it fades completely! I bet my boy would love to have a look at that…"

The man trailed off uncertainly at the flat look on the sergeant's face. The sergeant raised an eyebrow, and the rookie audibly gulped. He gave a sheepish grin, and then turned back to the girl. "Why don't you go and bring the tray back to the kitchens? It'll be a lot lighter now," he pointed out.

"Okay," she chirped. She got up, saw the other bowl of stew was still untouched, and frowned up at the sergeant. "Officer! You never eat," she said disapprovingly.

"Of course I eat," he told her. "I'm just not hungry."

"You mean you want to get back to work, and you don't want to take five minutes to eat something." She shook her head, the picture of a mother hen-to-be in a tiny little apron. She turned to look at the newcomer, gave him a quick once-over, came up with "scruffy vagabond, no big deal" and commanded him to move his bag before it got dumped. She was shocked when he went white, all but threw the waterskin and bread down, and grabbed onto the oilcloth bundle for dear life.

The older man stepped between them, shot a look at the boy, and then took the bowl off the tray. "Go back to the kitchens. If you've got time to stare, you've got time to work," he said quietly. Harsh as the words seemed, there was no bite behind them, just a dismissal and a sense of long-suffering patience.

She nodded seriously, picked up the tray and set off back up the path to the house.

The boy knew that even now, the house would be busy, the owners and their relatives and their servants and their guests and even a few domestic animals all making up the hustle and bustle of a large household. Here, in a little bubble of space by the main walk, it was silent as the grave, the quiet of air stilling before a lightning strike. He even imagined he could smell that odd not-quite-burning smell that came in the wake of a storm.

* * *

The Lady Molina smiled tolerantly at the antics of the neighbor boys. Now if only her husband would grow a sense of humor. Of course, she reasoned, no one becomes rich and powerful by being nice, but he didn't have to threaten to set the Sergeant on them. They had all turned rather interesting shades of grayish white and brown, though, and considering she would have to put up with the eyesore of a striped orchard for a month, now of all times...

Her face hardened, falling into familiar frown lines she knew were deepening by the day. The boys might not have meant any harm, but the fact was that they'd wasted spell ingredients on a juvenile prank, at a time when even common quartz crystals were becoming more expensive. No, mucking the stables had been a fitting punishment. They would be released from their extra duties when the spell faded, and not a moment sooner.

Boot-heels clicking on the floor, she swept along the main hall of her husband's grand house. Not her house, not yet, for all that she was no longer part of her father's household. She should have lived with him in their own little shelter near her parents' home for a month after the wedding, yet she'd instead been deposited here like a sack of grain on sale. As a daughter with no magical talent, such was her fate. That didn't mean she had to like the miserly bastard.

She stopped suddenly, stifling a colorful oath that would have had Auntie washing her mouth out with soap. The tray from the guards' supper lay forgotten on a table, and that flighty servant girl had forgotten one of the bowls.

_No, that isn't fair_, she corrected herself. _Millie might flutter around a bit and stop to talk too often, but she always does her job. The bowl could just be that old sergeant being stubborn, but she wouldn't have just left the tray unless something was wrong._

Setting off to the servants' wing, the Lady swept her eyes side to side, watching for that flash of straw-colored hair under a white servants' cap and fluttering black skirts, every inch her mother in miniature. A lump came to her throat as she thought of Millie's mother Helena, once undisputed ruler of the house servants and now a shriveled wisp of her former self. Helena had been invaluable when she'd first come here, the only one in the house who hadn't either despised or sucked up to her on sight. As lost as she'd been, Helena had been a much-needed support.

And if Helena was a support, the new guards were a relief. As soon as she'd learned that city watchmen had been assigned to the house on a semi-permanent basis, she'd known it had less to do with Ceferino's interests and more to do with her status as a tribe chief's daughter. If she so chose, she was in a very good position to spy on one of the major economic controllers of western Viridian, so someone had assigned her watchdogs. Then said watchdogs had arrived, and her first impression of Watch Officer Fenton as he got up from slipping on a stray potato peel was "fat lump." The Watch Sergeant had seemed competent, but otherwise forgettable. Then a so-called patriot had somehow made it past the outer defenses and caught her walking on the garden path.

She'd been cornered against the dratted unclimbable wall with a knife to her throat and a very unwelcome hand venturing near her skirts when the lump had flying-tackled the intruder and disarmed him in two moves. The sergeant had immediately followed, scolded the junior officer for recklessness and accidentally-on-purpose knocked the intruder out cold when he tried to escape. From that day on, they were accepted as borderline members of the household. The new Lady may have been a foreign bitch, but she was their foreign bitch, damn it!

...Perhaps the injuries she'd caused the man with her very sharp and pointy hairpin had had something to do with her newfound support among the staff, as well. That, and the liquor she'd smuggled out of the wine cellar and offered to a few of the kitchen staff to share. Bread and circuses, indeed.

She smiled thinly at the memory, remembering the look on her husband's face when he'd seen proof of the incident in the form of a still-bloody hairpin. Call it evidence, call it a trophy, either way, it had gotten her free run of the estate.

Suddenly, she felt a familiar tug on her skirts.

"Millie? Where have you been?" she scolded.

The child looked up at her, eyes wide and wet with tears. "I saw him."

Smile long gone and eyebrows drawn together, the Lady Molina tried to think of who could upset the child so badly and came up empty. She asked the girl, "Saw who?"

"The boy from your stories, in that picture you showed me. You said if I saw him, then that was his just his ghost, and I should be polite and keep going and not look at him, but I didn't know it was him, I mean it!"

She froze.

The girl continued, babbling, "I didn't know it was the same boy at first, because he was all dirty and his hair was too long and he looked a little taller, but he has the same accent you do and he really does look like the boy in your picture..."

Something terribly bright welled up in her chest. It couldn't be, not after he'd vanished into nowhere just before war was declared, not when he would have had to make it past the increased security at the border and over miles of country that would not welcome a child of the Low Wilds. Not when he'd been mourned, after his spirit was set to rest. She knelt to look the child in the eyes, careless of dirtying her skirt. Pulling all her feeling deep inside herself where it couldn't stop her words, she asked, "Millie? Are you sure it was him?"

The girl nodded, olive-green eyes peeking out from over her hands.

She couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. What if? What if her stupid little brother wasn't an early casualty of war? It was impossible...

...but he'd always had a knack for pulling off the impossible, ever since that day when Father's enemy had tried to strike through his children, and her little brother _hadn't been there_ just long enough for Father to draw his sword and strike back.

* * *

_Tap_.

The boy started as the sergeant put his stew back on the table. Taking a deep breath, the man exchanged a look with his partner. They turned to look at the boy, and the sergeant shattered the silence. "You got a name, kid?"

The boy shifted his hold on the bundle and nodded slightly.

"What is it?" the younger watchman asked, subtle as a punch in the gut.

_These men are city watch, on private property. But if they were unwelcome, the servants wouldn't even go near them if they could help it. Our countries are at war… But I came all this way to ask for help, and I can't do that if I can't even get past the gate guards._

The boy drew himself to his full height. Far short of the taller man, but he could at least try to look the old one in the eye. Sucking in a breath, he forced himself to relax enough to speak calmly and directly, just as his father had told him to. "My name is Vlad. I'm here to visit my sister, Tatiana Molina, formerly of the Storm Shaped tribe of what you call the Central Low Wilds. Could I please talk to her?"

* * *

A/N: Hands up if any of you saw that coming. And yes, that was planned since the start.


End file.
